


Someday We'll Linger in the Sun, or A Story about Them

by OddKid42



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Character Death, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV First Person, POV Kevin, Religious Content, Religious Cults, a bit freeform, alternative universe, in which I have feelings about Charles as a theologian when Strexcorp hit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22081498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OddKid42/pseuds/OddKid42
Summary: Kevin awakens from StrexCorps' control and returns to Desert Bluffs for his boyfriend, Charles the Theologian
Relationships: Charles/Kevin (Welcome to Night Vale)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Someday We'll Linger in the Sun, or A Story about Them

**Author's Note:**

> I can't recall where I read the idea about Kevin's boyfriend likely being a theologian if Carlos is a scientist, but regardless I had a lot of feelings about that. Title from Gaelynn Lea's song  
> First person POV is Kevin then switches to Charles

Years before, there was a radio host of Desert Bluffs who reported on the news at the start of the evening with the sun sending out pinks and shadows as it faded over the sand. He had an intern named Vanessa who worked for college credit and attended The University of What It Is during the day that he got along with and tried to keep out of danger. His script editor, Lauren, got on his nerves at times with her suggestions, but there was no better feeling than completing a night’s work and knowing that his voice had kept the night owls company as they listened. In the morning, they could reuse sections of the late night broadcast, and he could sleep until the afternoon. 

It was a good life, and he was content with the people he worked with and his boyfriend, an aspiring theologian, even though they were a small group of people in a small, unheard of desert town. 

Strex Corporation took over slowly. It was a coffee shop initially that closed down in competition to Strex’s coffee shop chain then sold to the company. The older Wisconsin lady who ran it shook her head but said she needed to retire anyway. The company began to genetify the neighborhood, building a skyscraper for overpriced residential apartments that didn’t allow children or pets and renting workspaces that the imported workers filled. 

The radio reporter stared at the metallic eyesore on his walk to work, slightly unnerved with the workers who never seemed to be away from their desk, but told himself that the company could only take over so much. If no one sold property to them, they couldn’t take over beyond what they have already bought. 

Within two years, two more skyscrapers had been built, and their instantaneous package delivery and robot home security had grown popular amongst the pupil-less workers. The radio host reported on the newest trend of inserting machinery into your brain stem to work longer with confusion and nervousness. Strex Corp had broken up all small businesses in the town, including a store that only repaired lawn mowers, and citizens had been left only to work underneath the company that had made them unemployed. The community radio station was the last independent business, a non-profit that ran off of community donations with the radio host, Lauren, and intern Vanessa as the last unhired people. 

Then the worst occurred. Strex Corp pulled a landownership record claiming that the building was an inch intruding on the neighboring empty lot, now owned by Stex Corp. They claimed that they owed $800 a month in rent since the radio station had been built. They couldn’t pay it. 

When the Strex Corporate businessmen arrived, Kevin blocked the front door with his body. Eyes glowing orange, spectres of tentacles waving threatening behind him, he had screamed for them to leave the station alone. 

They ripped something from him then. Physically, because there had been, were, scars that indicated muscles ripped out of him and facial scarring for the Smiling God was present, but also emotionally. 

Laying nearly unconscious, he could hear Lauren and Vanessa screaming and kept thinking, “This isn’t real. This can’t be real. This can’t be how it ends.” but the room had no other exits and he knew they were trapped. 

He became Kevin, the Strex Corp employee, not out of his free will but by having his dreams disposed of, person by person. 

... 

It took a week that Kevin spent slowly exiting a haze of sleeping, eating, and using the bucket that was always clean by the time he woke again in the white room. Half-asleep, he began to remember fragments of his life. Crisp paper on a clean wooden desk. The sky at sunrise and early morning desert wind. Charles kissing his forehead as he left for seminary in the morning and talking to him in bed. A sudden sharp stab of static.  


He felt his self emerging from underneath the haze. Kevin understood that wherever he was now would not be Desert Bluffs but also not likely Strex Corps. Which meant he needed to find Charles and save Desert Bluffs.  


This is why when Carlos ended the room at the end of the week, he realized with surprise that Kevin’s eyes were a sunlit yellow. The sickly man then broke a pitcher against the bedside table.  


“Okay, asshole.” Kevin, the real Kevin, coughed a bit but kept his burning eyes on Carlos. “Where am I, who are you, and where is Desert Bluffs’ theologian?”  


“What? I- uh, um. My name is Carlos, and I am Night Vale’s scientist.” He kept his hands up as he stepped away from the scattered earthenware. He wasn’t sure if the sheriff's secret police rushing in would be a good idea or not. “You are in Night Vale.”  


Kevin seemed to determine he wasn’t lying after a few seconds and set down the pitcher on the table. “I need a ride to Desert Bluffs then. I have business to take care of.” Upon standing, he stumbled but caught himself against the bed. He touched the missing muscles from the side of his leg and acknowledged the gap as secondary.  


“You still need to rest for a while,” Carlos advised sympathetically but also intimidated by the potentially psychotic man.  


Kevin frowned at the pitiful look on the scientist’s face, the scientist who looked like Charles but wasn’t, and walked in a limp past him. “I’ve slept long enough.”  


With that, he walked towards his hometown, the desert wind intertwining its fingers through his disheveled hair and along his back.  
...  


I found him in the church, kneeling, head hung like in sleep or in prayer, palms open, waiting for a gift or to be struck down.  


I bent in front of him and placed my palms in his, fingers on his wrist. He raised his head with eyes closed claiming in a broken insistence that he was the ordained priest of the Smiling God. Intruding on the prayer ground would cause death for all. No one shall see the Smiling God and live untouched. His voice cracked in between words as he stumbled onward, clinging to the mantra and trying to trace himself through familiarity of the threats however foreign they were and disconnected that he felt.  


I placed a hand over his eyes and kissed him, stopping his mouth with mine, catching his bottom lip and prying his teeth open then brushing against his tongue with mine to cease the words.  


I pulled away, and he took a shuttered breath. I breathed into him again, working myself into his lips, his teeth, his tongue, moving them. After so long the absence and so long the taste I worked his mouth into mine.  


He was more spiritual than I was, but I could remember the rhythm of some phrases. Some of the movement.  


“My name used to be the first and last word on your lips in the morning and at night,” I whispered against his lips moving them as I spoke. “Say my name once more.”  


His mouth opened wordlessly, and his eyes, tinted glass black, didn’t know me.  


“Why do you dress in sackcloth, my prophet? Do you no longer pray for me, or have I died in your heart? Do you know longer know my name?”  


His eyes searched my face as I stood above him, and I saw that he didn’t know me. The drugs in his system didn’t allow room for me in his mind or my name in his mouth.  


I bent and placed my knee between his legs. “Get out of your sackcloth. I am no longer dead, and you will not hurt yourself around me.”  


He numbly gripped the garment but could not move further. I undressed him, gently, slowly. I guided his back on the tiled floor with my lips, holding his head against mine. When he was laid down shirtless on the tile, I leaned back and pulled his legs over mine.  


“You have forgotten my name, but it is not your fault. I wasn’t there to protect you when they came with their false god.” I paused to clear my eyes from tears. The way he looked radiant when he saw me and the way he looked at me so lost now. “My name is Kevin, and I bring the rain to your heart, Charles.”  


When we were done, when he had gasped my name and come, when I wrapped my jacket underneath his head for a pillow on the cold floor, he had said softly, tasting my name still, “Kevin? Do I- I don’t know you.”  


It had hurt. I wrapped my arm around him and said, “That’s okay. I love you. My love can be enough.”  


He slept then, on the floor with my fingers running through his hair. Listening to his breathing and shutters and kissing him awake from nightmares and soothing him asleep again. He was confused, coming in and out of consciousness, frowning at my presence in his space. He allowed me to hold him and touch his face, his hair, so he must have viewed me, whatever or whoever I was to him, as benevolent. He did not recognize me.  


I did not sleep. I ran my hand over his side and found the self-inflicted cuts, the carved marks of a whip curled over the curve of his back. I kissed him again, and asleep he made a small noise of question. I kissed his eyelids where sleepless nights and days had cut dents.  


My love, what have you done to yourself? What did they do to you?  


He sighs and presses his forehead deeper into my neck.  


In the morning, he woke uncertain, glancing around the blooded chapel. “It will fall in three days because I broke the sanctity,” he said quietly.  


I wanted to say “let it break”, but I didn’t. I offered a cup of grape juice, remains of a sober communion. “Then we have nothing to fear.”  


He scowled at me. “Then we have everything to fear.”  


He pushed the cup away and seemed to realize standing that he was nude. He searched my face and his body, and I realized delayed that last night wasn’t consensual.  


“Charles, I’m so sorry.” I wasn’t sure to embrace him or step away.  


He stared at me clouded. “Charles?” His voice did not claim any familiarity.  


I couldn’t speak, and he began to pace. “We need a sacrifice. The house of the Smiling God has been degraded. We must recover. But what? How? A blood sacrifice. There are no cattle, no bulls. Where is the fattened calf? We have all gone astray; each has turned to his own way. We can’t turn from the Smiling God. No, there is nowhere to turn, nowhere to run. What shall separate us from the wraith of the Smiling God? Nothing.”  


He continued to pace up and down the aisles, speaking to himself. I rested in a pew and watched as protective as I could.  


When he was asleep, if I could convince him to sleep regularly, I could clear the blood and teeth and animal viscera from the building. It was my fault for allowing it to occur. When Charles woke up, he shouldn’t have to see what his church had become.  


The blood from the carpet was in his hair, and it bothered me. However, I didn’t want to overstep as much as I had previously.  


“Would you shower?”  


He paused in his pacing and looked uncomprehending.  


“Can you bathe yourself?” I questioned myself for assuming he would be able to.  


He stepped back, reproachful and fearful, with me near, and I felt compelled to kiss him as I did the night before but doubted it would work again.  


Instead I opened my hand for his. “Follow me.”  


He nervously set his hand in mine, and I led us to a bathroom. After rummaging, I found two mouse-chewed towels to set aside and beckoned for him to follow me in.  


He watched me throughout, pulling his head away to watch me even when soap entered his eyes. I was gentle with his scars, fingernails picking away the crusted blood. The shower tinted pink and brown by the end.  


I draped the towel over his shoulders and around his waist. I wanted to retrieve sweatpants but was afraid to leave him alone.  


I spent the rest of the day encouraging him to eat thawed communion bread from the freezer and the canned red wine from the kitchen fridge while sewing the deacon robes to fit his emaciated frame, much to his horror.  


I talked to him. Sang to him, passing the point of embarrassment. I used my voice to fill the room. I offered us walking outside, but he insisted that if he ever left, the building would collapse. I didn’t argue with him.  


When sunset began to touch the broken stained glass window, I suggested that he sleep. He struck back and demanded that if I didn’t understand the threat of sloth, the central commandment of the Smiling God, then my heretic soul could leave.  


I promised that I’d stay. I followed him from room to room in his infinite anxious pacing and only interrupted him to set a hand against his when he wanted to kill a pigeon that had wandered in to nest.  


Hesitantly, startlingly, he complied the rest of the next day and the following to my concern. He ate without complaint or pacing. He showered at night and the next morning. He did not sleep except to sit upwards in the pew for a few hours, head initially nodded downward then jerked upward to attention before I convinced him to rest his head against my shoulders. I was able to guide his head down into my lap while he slept and run my fingers through his hair and against his face. He had cut his head bald to his scalp. Scattering of small scars across his head and lips suggested unsteady hands as he welded the knife. I leaned my head over his face and kissed him gently on his forehead and lips. He was always my favorite person in the world.  


He died on the third day of my arrival. He had gotten sick on the afternoon of the first day. His eyes were clearing of black, but I could not see his irises. He had begun to shake from the drug’s withdrawal. Whatever they had given him was not the same as mine though I tried to give him the medication created by Charles’s double.  


I spread out all that I could on the front pew, wrapped the drapery around him, and consoled him. Talking to him in verses about the desert and stories that he told me before I lost to Strex Corp. I sang anything I could think of: hymnals, pop music, bird song. He fell in and out of consciousness, but there were no hospitals for me to take him to. The church was stationed alone in the abandoned town and the town in the empty desert.  


I told him that I loved him. I told him not to go.  


He woke briefly. Deep brown eyes orbed in veined white, his eyes, peered through, and eyelashes beginning to regrow blinked slowly. His hand reached for me, and I pressed it against my face.  


“Kevin.”  


Worlds rose and fell when he said my name and knew me. It was reassurance of my presence and condemnation of my absence.  


“Charles.”  


I tried to convey my relief and my sorrow. That I promised to never leave him alone even when I was no longer myself.  


He closed his eyes, and his hand relaxed. He died.  


The church was silent. It did not fall. The viscera remained slew across the floors.  


The Smiling God had received its sacrifice.  


“No.”

I stood and gently picked up my lover. He was heavy even malnourished, and I struggled briefly holding him. His head fell backwards in my arms and a crack broke across the ceiling. Dust dropped from the roof.  


“No."

I carried him, no longer struggling, wrapped still in his sheets of draping purple trailing the floor. 

“I love you. Charles, I love you.”

The stained glass caved into the chapel, scattering light across the carpeted alter.  


“Charles, my Charles.”

He became heavier, and I struggled to hold him up at the door. The church would not let him go.  


I had never felt Charles’s connection to religion. He described early on in our relationship how spirituality was not contained in places of worship but surrounded people as we lived. You breathe it, he had said, and it lives in you. You pray to reach out to others from a distance. We all live from each other, and thus it lives in you.  


I didn’t understand then, and I asked what exactly “it” was. I think I know now.  


I stepped out of the church holding onto you, and it collapsed. I cleared a distance between us and it until I could no longer carry you.  


You remained dead. Your eyes wouldn’t open. Your body was just another body, but Charles, it’s you. It has always been you.  


“My love for you has never been just a song. It has never been platitudes. I will rise in the morning and see your face. I will fall asleep at night with you near. I will live with you, in you, in your joy and my joy until the two are indistinguishable. Charles, my love. Charles, you have never been a tool for someone else to weld. You have always been your own sun. But if the sun goes out, my heart will go with you. Please.”  


“Charles, wake up.”  
Wake up. 

You say wake up to me like it is so easy. As if I might yet be asleep or resting or in prayer. Would it be so simple, my love? Would you make it so simple?  


I open my eyes and you block my vision with your head against mine. I know it is you, Kevin, because who else would hold my forehead against theirs and whisper pop songs. You are not a Keats or Mary Oliver, but god, I love you too.  


I love you.

“I love you.”  


My voice cracks. Your breathing hitches. You pull away to see my face, and I squint in the sudden light you have created. Is it the sun or your orange glow? Was I truly dead or only asleep? I start to worry the depth was deeper.  


You begin to cry, sobs wracking your body, and I am forced despite my weakness of limbs to act. I say your name and maneuver my treacherous hand to pull you closer, and you hold me while I hold you. We are together. What is there to fear in this desert or in this world?


End file.
